Wednesday, February 03, 2016

The Year of Suck

When I started this blog a little over a year ago, it was at a time where I'd felt stuck in one place for a long, long time, and I was pretty miserable because of it. Among other things, I felt like I had utterly lost what it meant to be me. I didn't know where to go from there, but I was looking for small steps I could take that could take me... somewhere. When I wrote this post, I was only partly joking. It's a horrible feeling to not know who you are or what the point of your life is supposed to be.

The idea to make it about sucking at things was equals parts joke, self-flagellation (sorry, people who scolded me for that) and epiphany: I knew I had to get out of my comfort zone, and I knew that wherever I went, it would suck, but so would staying where I was. I figured that if I could teach myself to appreciate the bumbling steps I took whichever way I took them, that would be the key to open up the world to me. And it was. And it did. I never could have guessed where it would take me.

I will be moving out soon. Out of this house, which I love, and which has been my home for almost 7 years. Away from a relationship that has been my home for even longer. I cannot possibly tell you how much it hurts to clearly see how necessary both of these endings are. What I can tell you, is that I can finally say with certainty that I know I'll be ok.

I know I will embrace the world this year. I will go out to meet it, and I will fail at things and it will be glorious, because it will be new and strange and scary but I have trust in me.

I don't know where I will go, and I'm not going to lie to you and pretend that this doesn't cause me to have days where all I want to do is wrap myself up in a blanket and watch Buffy like a burrito of sadness, because it does. There are days when I am on the verge of crying every single hour of the day. I almost cried over socks the other day, because my sister got them for me and they were so incredibly soft. Socks.

But I no longer want to choose to not choose, just because that is the safe thing to do. I want to live and grow and fall and pick myself up again, because that is what living is supposed to be. I know this much.

I will continue to suck at blogging, even though I will never "monetize", because it helps me to organize my own thoughts if I have to figure out how to shape them into a blog post, and sometimes I get an email from someone on the other side of the planet telling me that my ramblings have somehow inspired them or helped them understand themselves better, and that is, without question, the best feeling in the world to me.

I will continue to suck at making new friends, applying my 20 seconds of courage to say hi and introduce myself and exposing myself to the very real possibility of someone not liking me or thinking I'm just too weird, and the equally real possibility that this will be the beginning of a genuine connection with another human being.

I will continue to battle life's various addictions and the debilitating shortcomings of my brain, because they prevent me from truly living, and even though trying to wrangle them feels like handling snakes in a basket sometimes, I have come this far, and every fall has only made me stronger. Those snakes have nothing on me.

I will continue my bumbling attempts at being creative through whatever medium strikes my fancy at the time, and maybe I will share some of it and you'll all get to go snort-laugh and tell me that's not how any of that works, but that won't matter because it will be fun.

I will continue to move my body in awkward and embarrassing ways, because no matter how ashamed I am about it and how hard I have to fight to go out there, making my body do challenging things makes me feel strong and powerful, and lord knows I need that right now.

I will be here if you need me. Up there singing in the rafters, trying to find my voice.